Muhammad Abdullah Ghazi

Muhammad Abdullah Ghazi (1 June 1935-17 October 1998) was a Pakistani cleric and the first leader of the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) movement in Islamabad. He was assassinated in 1998.

Biography
Ghazi was born in Basti-Abdullah in British Raj (present-day Pakistan) on 1 June 1935 in the district of Rajanpur. He graduated from Jamia Uloom-ul-Islamia in Banoritown in Karachi, and in 1966 he became the first Imam of the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in the capital city of Islamabad.

Ghazi created many seminaries in Pakistan, and was critical of many governments, but he was a close friend of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's martial law regime. From 1979 to 1989 he supported the recruitment of Mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union and had ties to Osama bin Laden, the founder of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network. However, he was assassinated on 17 October 1998 in the courtyard of Lal Masjid.